Paula Zahn Now

Always good to see you, sir. Welcome.

JAMES WOOLSEY, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Good to be with you, Paula.

ZAHN: All right, two in one day. First, the director of the CIA, George Tenet resigns. And then CNN confirmed this afternoon that the CIA’s deputy director of operations will announce his resignation tomorrow. Were they pushed out?

WOOLSEY: I don’t think so. I think we should take George Tenet and the president at their word. Seven years is an awfully long time to stay in that job.

And then when you add to it the acting — the time he was acting and the time he was deputy director, he has been really nine years out there I think in those senior positions. That’s a long time to be in that.

ZAHN: There are others out there who suggest, though, the timing of this, while it caught people off guard, could be pretty predictable, because two scathing reports are coming out from various Senate committees on the CIA’s actions leading up to 9/11, in addition to some of the problems with its intelligence leading us to war in Iraq. Do you discount that?

WOOLSEY: I had scathing reports from Senator DeConcini, one of my four oversight chairmen. And I waited until he was stepping down from the Senate before I resigned. And the scathing report was stupid. And I think any scathing report about the CIA on 9/11 is legitimately scathing if it talks about they’re not having — given the material about these two terrorists, al-Midhar and al-Hamzi, whom they were tracking in Malaysia in January of 2000, they didn’t give that information to the FBI or the State Department.

And so they couldn’t be kept out of the country and they became two of the bombers. But, other than that, most of the material that people might have known about 9/11 wasn’t in the purview of the CIA. And the planning was taking place in Germany and in the United States, which is two places the CIA doesn’t spy. And the CIA wasn’t responsible for the flimsy cockpit doors on the airliners or the fact that the Air Force didn’t have fighter interceptors in Washington or New York and on and on. The country was asleep.

And I think if the Senate committee comes out with a report that says Tenet or the CIA was principally responsible for 9/11, it will just be wrong.

ZAHN: And do you believe this had anything to do with political maneuvering within the Bush administration, unhappy with the way George Tenet has always been highly critical of Ahmad Chalabi?

WOOLSEY: I don’t think that has anything to do with this. I think it is just a very long time. It is the seventh anniversary of George having taken the job, on the 11th of July.

He has an opportunity to get out before it would be a political issue right at the time of the election. And he wants to take son he says around to colleges in the fall. I think it is a perfectly reasonable thing.

ZAHN: Mr. Woolsey, thank you for your perspective tonight. Appreciate it.

WOOLSEY: It’s good to be with you, Paula.

ZAHN: Always good to see you.